Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

New Age, continued...

Group

Where

Year

Source

Quote/Notes

New Age

Washington, D.C.

1999

Anderson, Jack. Millennium. New York: Tor (1994); pg. 55.

"Ghost cursed as he examined his loot. He was certain it was worthless. The suit was some kind of weird cheap plastic--not even metallic, as he had first thought--and the rock that had been the belt buckle resembled some of the rocks he had seen at one of the city's New Age shops. "

New Age

Washington, D.C.

1999

Anderson, Jack. Millennium. New York: Tor (1994); pg. 74.

"'We must lift ourselves up into a greater phase of being. By evolving, ourselves, we will receive what has been promised us and will become--'

The woman began wagging her finger at him. 'Shame on you!' she hissed. 'You go addin' to the Word of the Lord with that New Age and nothin' gonna save you from the lightning that's gonna come out of the sky and burn you down!...' "

New Age

Washington, D.C.

1999

Anderson, Jack. Millennium. New York: Tor (1994); pg. 86.

"'This is one scripture you may want to become familiar with. Elijah was taken up to heaven in what is described as a 'chariot of fire' that came down in a whirlwind. As you might guess, some New Agers have put their own twist to that story. They claim that Elijah was abducted by aliens.' "

New Age

Washington, D.C.

1999

Anderson, Jack. Millennium. New York: Tor (1994); pg. 142.

"'But what kind of god is he telling you to run toward? Ah, that is why he is the Deceiver! He is telling you to run toward whichever god suits your needs! From the foulest and most insidious cults to the New Age concept that we are all God--to the ancient Gnostics who felt that God was cold, distant... "

New Age

Washington, D.C.

1999

Anderson, Jack. Millennium. New York: Tor (1994); pg. 238.

"'Not today, Victor. You can talk all you want, with conviction and articulation. But when it comes right down to it, what you're passing out is the same New Age nonsense. The packaging is a bit different, but once you open it up, it's the same stinking thing, foul and sour.' "

New Age

Washington, D.C.

1999

Anderson, Jack. Millennium. New York: Tor (1994); pg. 299.

"'I'm warning you, Max. Back off. This guy has a core following. Talk of the town is that he's in the middle of a huge comeback. Even the New Age whackos are paying attention.'

Kemper shrugged. 'He's been whining for years about how bad off America was. Now he's dispensing advice on how to save the world.

'He's preaching New Age philosophy?'

'He's not into the hard-core metaphysics. Most of it's just common sense. But some of what he's saying has that New Age lilt. You know. Spiritual renewal. Wisdom of the Ages--'

'Buried under the floor of the high desert,' Kiernan said.

'Yeah.'

'Scrolls of ancient wisdom.'

...He strode out of the bar, fingering the pouch on his belt. New Age. Ancient scriptures. Healing crystals. Alien technology... "

New Age

world

1976

Moffett, Judith. Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream. New York: St. Martin's Press (1992); pg. x.

"...the discovery of the O'Hara Equations. This is the remnant of a once-numerous association of amateur archeologists, chiefly British, who call themselves 'ley hunters.' Leys are straight lines drawn on the landscape, on which important features such as churches, castles, stone circles... are precisely aligned. Of prehistoric origin, they are nevertheless found worldwide; the Nazca lines are perhaps the most famous. Half a century ago [circa 1975], ley lines briefly appeared in the popular press, as a host of credulous people came forward to claim that certain leys had been seen by psychics to glow with magnetic force, that they were dowsable, that they were part of a global network of power. Inevitably, serious investigation suffered as leys became linked in the public mind with crackpot theories and 'New Age' spiritualism. "

"We got out of the elevator to be confronted by a long line of worshippers and supplicants. There must have been seventy people strung out between the elevator and the Baron's door, waiting with copies of books by Madame Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, and Shirley MacLaine under their arms. "

"Say 'rationalist' to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. "

"In 1995... It would have been a good summer, if not for a carbonaceous asteroid dubbed 1995 BA.

The University of Hawaii's 2.2 meter telescope atop Mauna Kea first picked up the asteroid, which, with a diameter of 214 miles, would pass within 300,000 miles of earth. Many astronomers believed the asteroid would impact the moon, while others argued that its mass was too great and it would simply blow on past.

Quacks, new-agers, and fanatics of every ilk decided it was a sign, that the asteroid would bring the end of the earth or begin the Millennium or raise Atlantis. "

"James Wolcott, reviewing a recent tome of UFO lore in the New Yorker, describes his own close encounters with 'abductees':

They bugged me. I came to feel that I was dealing with a quasi-cult of deluded cranks. The abductees I interviewed, far from being people plucked out of the ordinary workday, had browsed the entire New Age boutique of reincarnation, channeling, auras, and healing crystals. . . . For them the aliens were agents of spiritual growth [but beneath that] was a pinched righteousness; the ones I met tended to be classic pills of passive aggression...

"Madame Blavatsky's heirs in the UFO era have recognized the same need to produce 'phenomena' that will impress the guileless groundlings. Blavatsky offered levitations, spirit music, letters from the ether; UFO promoters simulate crop circles as evidence of saucer landings, create 'alien autopsy' film footage, and script 'reenactments' for tabloid TV. At the same time, by way of fudging the issue and attracting a higher class of clientele, a pseudoscientific rationale is deployed in combination with the incense of a new Age religion that is all effortless transcendence. The afterlife described by spirit mediums was a balmy and shadowless eden, with scarcely a whiff of brimstone. Such has increasingly become the tone taken even by professional UFO abductees. " [More.]

"As a way of life, fandom offers many of the benefits of disorganized religion--religion, that is to say, of the New Age variety, emphasizing self-fulfillment at the expense of doctrinal orthodoxy or a code of ethics, without tithing, pricey churches, or official hierarchies, but a religion, even so, whose gospel is preached at conventions and in fanzines. "

"His motive is to save the woman he loves, who is none other than Gaea, Mother Earth herself, goddess of the New Age, who can be brought back to health only by this supreme sacrifice. " [More, pg. 145, etc.]

"Most New Age prophets and profiteers derive whatever systematic theology they have to the scheme set forth in Science and Health: Only the spiritual world is real; the physical world... is an illusion. " [More, pg. 156, 159.]

"On the one hand, one award-winning black SF writer, Octavia Butler, has made racial (and sexual) confrontations, in the future and in alternative pasts, almost her exclusive theme. Like [Orson Scott] Card, she works on large canvases. A first series of Patternist novels ran to five volumes, and that was followed by the Xenogenesis trilogy. Both sequences concern the interracial, or interspecies, breeding of humans to improve the species--in the first case, to create mutants with psychic powers; in the second, to defuse human aggressiveness. Butler's attitude to these undertakings is interestingly ambivalent. She has a New Age enthusiasm for telepathy, out-of-body experience, and kindred knacks, but her eugenics programs are run by malign supernatural beings or by Strieber-style alien experiments. As with Card, or... Anne Rice, an intense conviction coupled with a total lack of human allows Butler to invent compelling, if implausible plots. "

"The Number of the Beast... The last chapter is entitled 'Rev. XXII:13,' the verse of the book of Revelations: 'I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.'

Even with many grains of salt, one must wonder how Heinlein expected readers to view this revelation. Surely not as the gospel truth, even if interpreted with New Age liberality as meaning that each man is his godhead--but not as an ironic jape, either. Rather, it is the freakout to which he's entitled as a good American, whose right to lie is protected by the Constitution.

...In 1979 John Varley... published 'The Persistence of Vision,' a story in which a group of disastrously disabled (but psychically gifted) New Agers achieve nirvana and semiomnipotence by virtue of the secret wisdom that 'reality is a crutch.' Predictably, SF fans loved it, and it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. " [More, pg. 228.]

New Age

world

2003

Knight, Damon. Why Do Birds. New York: Tor (1992); pg. 124.

Pg. 123-124: "'And, of course, we can do anything we want with colors, according to local tastes... white is the color of mourning in China, so here we have our Chinese red, for good luck and prosperity. Here's your basic Shiite black, and here's the New Age psychedelic model.' "

New Age

world

2007

Knight, Damon. A Reasonable World. New York: Tor (1991); pg. 90.

"Encouraged by the success of these trial balloons, during the next few months Stevens went to the introductory lectures of an Indian guru, a self-maximization program, and a New Age chiliastic organization, and enrolled in classes at all three. "

New Age

world

2008

England, Terry. Rewind. New York: Avon Books (1997); pg. 65.

"'...Our own government had prepared an elaborate [landing] site [for the alien visitors] at Edwards Air Force Base where access could be controlled despite pleas from scientists, New Agers, UFO believers, science fiction writers, and the Dalai Lama...' "

New Age

world

2026

Moffett, Judith. Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream. New York: St. Martin's Press (1992); pg. xi.

"Half a century ago [circa 1976], ley lines briefly appeared in the popular press... Inevitably, serious investigation suffered as leys became linked in the public mind with crackpot theories and 'New Age' spiritualism.

O'Hara himself is generous about all this, 'I've learned a lot about leys since the sorry of the Equations broke. Some of it sounds pretty mumbo-jumbo, but no all. Maybe some of those New Age types really could see a glow. Many leys radiate out from a central point, usually a hill or a mountain, with a tradition of being a holy place. Lots of aligned churches in England are built on the former sites of pagan temples. Those sites are old--and nobody knows what the leys were there for--nobody! Now we have a tool we can use to find out if primitive peoples, people with a relationship to the landscape we can't even imagine, may have been sensitive to forces most modern humans can't sense at all.' "

'Going to build one, boy. Up in Santa Rosas--the Kennelly labs, they're made to order. All the rooms you want, and heavy equipment--two months to get organized, and then watch us go.'

'Why not White Sands?' [in New Mexico]

Platt shook his head impatiently. 'I don't want it, Davey. One thing, every space-happy nut in the country will be there by now--you'll have to elbow 'em out of the way to spit. Then, what they have got that we need? Hardware, yes, missile frames, yes, but most of it is the wrong scale. We're going to start fresh...' "

"...his own hands were a bizarre computer-generated pearly texture instead of their normal shade of Santa Fe. "

New Mexico

galaxy

3000

Zahn, Timothy. Angelmass. New York: Tor (2001); pg. 90.

"The Barrio had extended maybe two kilometers at its widest; the whole of New Mexico City had stretched only thirty. " [Also pg. 219. Actually a reference to a new 'Mexico City', not a reference to 'New Mexico.']

"Within the car, he spread out the map. Highway 66, he thought to himself. Up to Barstow and then across the Mojave Desert to Needles, and then a long grade, across the Arizona border to Kingman. And then straight east, through New Mexico and then the Texas Panhandle, to western Oklahoma as far as Oklahoma City, and then north. All the way to Chicago. "

'We can get you to New Mexico before news of this incident reaches America...' "

New Mexico

New Mexico

1985

Zelazny, Roger. Trumps of Doom. New York: Arbor House (1985); pg. 59.

"I opened the letter, written on motel stationary, and read:

Merle,Too bad about dinner. I did wait around. Hope everything's okay. I'm leaving in the morning for Albuquerque. I'll be there three days. Then up to Santa Fe for three more. Staying at the Hilton in both towns...

Hm.I phoned my travel agent and discovered that I could be on an afternoon flight to Albuquerque if I hustled. " [Other New Mexico refs., pg. 60-63.]

"Ash's books were most regrettably scattered across Europe and America. By far the largest single gathering was of course in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. " [Other refs. to New Mexico, as the Ash collection there is important to the main characters. Also pg. 111, 113, 337.]

"'In 1946... an experimental spacecraft crash-landed in the Sonoran Desert of New Mexico. Contrary to the rumors that have arisen every now and again, the crew was not killed, and their bodies have not been kept frozen in a secret facility at some Air Force base.' "

Aldiss, Brian. "Becoming the Full Butterfly " in Supertoys Last All Summer Long. New York: St. Martin's Griffin (2001; c. 1995); pg. 212.

"Private automobiles were banned. They were corralled in huge parks as far north as Blanding, Utah; at Shiprock, New Mexico, in the east; and at Tuba City, Arizona, to the south. The Hopis and Navajos were making a killing. "

For lots of reasons, but in particular, this time, because I've mangled her New Mexico homeland before, and she still hasn't shot me. ";

Back book jacket: "Serial killers come in all shapes and sizes. But this one is particularly puzzling. There's no pattern to the mutilated bodies that have been showing up in Albuquerque: both sexes, all races, ages, ethnic groups. There is no evidence of rape or ritual... "; Pg. 4-5: Santa Fe; Pg. 24: "He hated New Mexico. The Rio Grande was supposed to be this wide awesome river... "; Pg. 72: Bernalillo [Novel takes place primarily in New Mexico. Refs. throughout, not in DB.]

Simon Hawke became a full-time writer in 1978 and has almost sixty novels to his credit. He received a BA in Communications from Hofstra University and an MA in English and History from Western New Mexico University. He teaches science fiction and fantasy writing through Prima College in Tucson, Arizona.

Hawke lives alone in a secluded Santa Fe-style home in the Sonoran desert about thirty-five miles west of Tucson, near Kitt Peak and the Tohono O'Oodham Indian Reservation. He is a motorcyclist, and his other interests include history, metaphysics, gardening, an collecting fantasy art. "

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